For any politician to share a bedroom with a member of the same sex might
invite childish gossip.

But in William Hague’s case, he was surely aware that sleeping in the same hotel room as a 25-year-old aide would inevitably rekindle baseless rumours about his sexuality that have pursued him throughout his impressive political career.

Conservative colleagues have described his sleeping arrangements as naive, foolish and ill-judged. But at the same time the Foreign Secretary received widespread sympathy from MPs of every stripe after he was driven to make an extraordinary public statement about his private life in an attempt to put an end to slurs circulating on the internet.

Mr Hague’s sexuality, of course, is his business and has no relevance to his career. It would, however, have become relevant if he had given a publicly funded job to someone with whom he was having a relationship. Hence the reason Mr Hague felt he had to make it clear that he had never had a relationship with Christopher Myers, the other man in the hotel room, or indeed with any man. Mr Myers, who quit his £30,000-a-year job in Mr Hague’s office on Wednesday, also confirmed their friendship was entirely innocent.

Rumours that Mr Hague, 49, was homosexual have dogged him since his days at Oxford and, cruelly for his wife Ffion, persisted after the couple married in 1997.

No matter how unfair or unfounded the gossip was, it became a fact of life for Mr Hague and one that, until now, he had simply brushed aside.

His highly unusual decision to make a public statement on Wednesday about his sexuality – in which he also revealed the personal tragedy of his wife’s repeated miscarriages – is regarded as a serious lapse of judgment by close friends and PR gurus alike, as it alerted the entire country to a smear which, until then, few people had been aware of.

Sources close to Mr Hague have told The Daily Telegraph that he was advised by Tory public relations specialists not to respond to the rumours circulating on the internet for precisely that reason, but Mr Hague had become so exasperated that he decided “enough is enough”.

One friend of Mr Hague said: “He has had years of people talking about his sexuality behind their hands and sniggering and he decided to confront it head on. It was a highly personal decision but something he felt passionately he wanted and needed to do.

“Of course, his political career will depend on the statement being entirely honest and factual. He would have been mad, insane, to have lied in any way. But he did not, it is the truth.” All of which, his friends admit, puts an even bigger question mark over Mr Hague’s judgment in deciding to share a room with Mr Myers at the Hotel du Vin in Birmingham during the televised leaders’ debate in April, and on other occasions during the general election campaign.

Mr Hague now accepts that “in hindsight I should have given greater consideration to what might have been made of that”.

Despite being the nation’s most precocious political talent, having memorably addressed the Tory conference as a 16 year-old in 1977, Mr Hague has always displayed a certain naivety about how others see him, typified by his boasts about 14-pint drinking sessions and his insistence on wearing baseball caps. One of his oldest friends, the financier Guy Hands, believes the rumours about Mr Hague’s sexuality grew out of nothing more than the fact that he had close friends at Oxford who were homosexual, and championed their rights while at university.

Mr Hands told Mr Hague’s biographer: “Certainly in the 15 months that William lived in my house in Nelson Street [Oxford] I didn’t see that William’s sexuality was anything but heterosexual, and indeed never have since.

“Although there were pockets of gay activity that coalesced around the Oxford Union (of which Mr Hague was president) and the Oxford University Conservative Association, William was not associated with them.”

Mr Hague did have girlfriends at university, but friends said he “wasn’t particularly sexually driven” and was subjected to innuendo because of the fact that he shared a house for a time with the openly homosexual Alan Duncan, who later became a parliamentary colleague.

When Mr Hague became an MP at the age of 27 and a minister in 1995, aged 33, the rumours persisted, largely because of his bachelor status.

Shaun Woodward, who quit the Tory party in a row over gay rights and joined Labour, was reported to have told colleagues Mr Hague could never be Conservative leader because he had a “gay past”.

During Mr Hague’s successful leadership campaign in 1997 he decided to confront the issue, telling MPs he would not have run for leader if he had been homosexual (thus offending homosexuals who inferred that he was saying a gay man could not be a party leader).

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph at the time, he described the rumours as “water off a duck’s back” and said his friends knew the claims were ridiculous. Even so, he had to endure suggestions that his engagement to Ffion in 1997 was somehow a contrivance, and even after the wedding he was repeatedly asked about his sexuality.

On ITV’s This Morning in 1998, he was asked by Richard Madeley: “What about this rumour that you were gay that went around for two or three years? It seems to have gone on until you actually got married. Does that disturb you?”

Mr Hague replied: “That one’s been blown away now. In politics you get things said about you in every kind of way … you get used to that and as long as you know who you are yourself you don’t have to worry about it.”

The former MP Gyles Brandreth put the question to him again in an interview the following year, when he again insisted the rumours were “absolutely untrue”.

Still the gossip persisted, but instead of repeating the familiar suggestions of a “gay past”, Mr Hague recently became aware of claims that his marriage was in trouble and that his childless status was in some way evidence of homosexuality.

Rather than being “water off a duck’s back” as it had been in the past, Mr Hague and his wife, who, as we now know, had suffered several miscarriages, most recently this summer, found the rumours deeply hurtful, and it was this which prompted his statement.